Personal Responsibly, all my life I have heard people talking about Personal Responsibility. That is always a great topic to talk about when you are talking about someone else. That is such a great phrase, personal responsibility. Do you know what I think is wrong with that phrase? The person that is saying it, is always talking about someone else or another group of people and never themselves. My parents always wanted me to take personal responsibly for my mistakes as I was growing up. They wanted me to “face the music”. Today everyone seems to be tap dancing around personal responsibility.

When I was growing up and almost the first 40 years of my life I never felt that I had to take any responsibility toward race relations  in this country. I am a descendent of Scandinavian immigrants who came during the late 1800s and early 1900s. They didn’t enslave anyone. They settled in Iowa and Wisconsin that had a very small minority population. They were just hard working people that were pursuing the American Dream. Because my descendents didn’t enslave anyone I thought that it was not my problem and that I was not part of the problem. Did my burying my head in the sand help accomplish anything? No, because of people like me maybe the problem got worse. In the 70s I thought that the problem of racism was slowly going away. I think that because we thought that the problem was going away we could stop working so hard. What I didn’t realize there were fewer racists politically because the southern Democrats had left the Democratic party but yet had refused to join the party of Lincoln, the Republican Party, but they never really went away. That was all true until Reagan. Being a Northerner I didn’t pay enough attention to the politics of the South. I didn’t realize the voting bloc of the old Southern Democrats were sitting out their just to be plucked by the right Politician. That Politician was Reagan. He courted them with his attacks on Welfare and the fact that he was going to go after those people on Government assistance. He was the one that painted the Government as bad and that Government assistance to those that were just ripping off the system was also bad. I voted for Reagan. I wanted him to go after those that were ripping off the system. Welfare was different from state to state and Wisconsin was better than Illinois so we had a few that would move to Wisconsin for the better benefits and I wanted it to stop. I didn’t realize what the results to the nation would be almost 40 years later. How we voted over 40 years ago is why we have some of the problems today.

I don’t know if Reagan knew what he was setting in motion but in a way, he attacked the two things that were very important to our Country’s unity and equality.  One was the courting of those that had left the Democratic Party because of Civil Rights the so called “Religious Right” and the other was going after the Unions. Do I think that Reagan was a bigot? I wrestle with that . One thing I do believe is that he was an opportunist that could see a way to always win. I do believed that Reagan believed in smaller government and so did I. In many respects I still do but what we have going on now is not smaller Government. It seems that whenever we roll back Government regulations banking systems collapse or he have environmental disasters. The real damage that I think that Reagan did was when he went after the Unions. I was never an Anti-Union guy. I know that the expansion of the middle class had a lot to do with the growth of the Unions. Unions also helped create equality in the work environment. All races where able to be union members. Unions helped people of all races work together. I was a Supervisor at the time and I liked the fact that there was a negotiated contract that established rules that had to be followed. I knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely and that Union stopped my potential abuse. I knew that my actions were going to be examined by the HR Department and was subjected to grievances by the Union membership. That forced me to do my job properly. Looking back now I am glad that I had that to make sure I did my job right. With Reagan the Unions decreased and so did the middle class start to decrease. I voted for Reagan. Am I responsible for some of his actions? The answer would be yes. I believed in many of the same things that Reagan but what we got wasn’t the smaller Government that I wanted.  I could write a whole article about his economic plans but that is for another time. Would I vote for him now knowing what I know now? Of course not. But we don’t get repeats. We just have take responsibility of our mistakes, move on and learn. That is where we make our mistakes is that we don’t learn and move on.

A lot of this is simple Physics. For every action there is a reaction. Reagan attacking Unions resulted in the shrinking of the middle class. The stability of the nation was that middle class that both parties had to work for their vote. The shrinking of the middle class has affected the stability of our nation,  in my opinion. As the income gap grows so does the instability of our nation. In some ways the shrinking of the middle class has added to people’s dependence of government not weaned it off. The Union Jobs were replaced by lower paying  jobs with very few benefits. I have read that two thirds of people getting government assistance have at least one family member that is working and that half of the people getting government assistance are working full time jobs. Maybe the problem could be the pay they are making and not the fact they are getting government assistance. You can say that they need to go out and find a better paying job. Any job that you flood with people winds up eventually being a lower paying job because there will be less competition in employment. Also, those lower paying jobs that they left will still be there and someone has to perform them. I really worry about our hospital system. Fewer people with benefits means fewer people can pay their hospital bills. That only jacks up the price for those that do have insurance. Our economy being a service economy more and more and healthcare being one of the biggest Service Industry I worry about it all will come crashing down because of people’s lack of insurance. If this assistance is not going to come from the Government where is it going to come from? Remember physics:  action, reaction. Do we just leave them to die?

Today when I vote I look at a much bigger picture. I think about physics and what the reaction will be to any given problem. What would the results be if we took Medicaid away? If we raised the retirement age to 70, how would that affect the Black males whose average life expectancy in the United States is just 72.3 years, seven years less than a White male? What would happen to Democracy if we let Ukraine fall? Would Poland be next?  What was the action that created the instability in the Middle East? Action and reaction. There is no way around it. For every action there is going to be a reaction, some good, and some bad, and some both. The trick is learning what that reaction could before we act.